One person told me they saw a very popular MMORPG DOUBLE in frame rates in one particular scene because of multi-threaded OpenGL. We’re talking from 60 frames to 130 frames just in that one scene alone.

Tuncer goes on to mention that multi-threaded OpenGL will only be available on the new Mac Pro but may yet make it into Tiger 10.4.8. But, he then contradicts himself and says it may wait for Leopard.

Ah, the way of rumors.

I’m a bit puzzled as to what multi-threaded OpenGL means. Does this mean that it is now thread-safe? I thought it already was. Or does this mean it “automagically” takes advantage of additional cores and processors behind the scenes with no additional programmer work?

Either way, it will be interesting to see what kind of performance gains we will see.

TransGaming today released the “Cider” portability engine for Intel-based Macs, offering game developers and publishers the ability to deploy Windows-based games on new Macs quickly and easily, without the need for traditional arduous porting.

This sounds interesting, but “Cider” uses a Windows compatibility library to allow this to work. I wonder what the performance hit, if any, will be. This could be the answer to bringing more AAA games to the Mac on a more resonable schedule.

Update: As I suspected, there will be a performance hit for “porting” Windows games to the Mac using Cider.Ã‚Â As MacSlash reports:

The company claims that, performance-wise, “the average user won’t be able to discern any difference,” but does confess that “users are bound to see 10 to 15 percent lower frame rates than they would in a truly native game.”

MacSlash also says that Cider uses the open source WINE project as a basis for their magic. Ã‚Â I wonder how many companies are going to jump on this “free” code to come out with their own products.